The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ in total from 1790 to 1940. Heavy spending on the war buildup and consequent massive hiring by both the military and the private sector worked like magic. Over the next four years, the gross national product doubled and the unemployment rate fell to a mere 1.2 percent.³⁷

      The fact that U.S. industries could ramp up production to a historically unprecedented output within months in support of urgent national goals has inspired present-day visions of a similar industrial mobilization to combat greenhouse warming. There has been less discussion of the deep adaptations that were required of the wartime economy. Overnight, a government that had struggled for a decade with an excess of production and a deficit of consumer buying power had to figure out how to start serving a population that had plenty of money to spend but now faced shortages of goods on which to spend it. The economy had gone from cash-limited to resource-limited. If nothing were done, Depression-era price deflation would flip into just-as-destructive hyperinflation. The federal government responded, tiptoeing into the murky waters of price controls. Under the Office of Price Administration, the process began in 1940 with voluntary campaigns, one commodity at a time, and by 1943 had escalated into a mandatory clampdown on prices throughout the economy.³⁸

      Enforcing ceilings on prices is a sure, direct way to stop inflation, but it doesn’t guarantee fair access. Suppressed prices boost the demand for goods but not the supply. And in the 1940s, supplies of goods were further limited by the diversion of workers and resources into the effort to win the war. The U.S. government was eventually forced into a second level of intervention to make sure that the entire population had access to an adequate supply of food, shelter, clothing, and other basic necessities.

      SHRINK, STANDARDIZE, SIMPLIFY

      Washington had thrown in the towel in its effort to institute economic planning during the Depression. Now, with a resource-intensive effort to win a war in Asia and Europe, and with the threat of critical shortages at home, planning of production and consumption would become the rule in both the military and civilian economies. A month after the United States entered World War II, a War Production Board (WPB) was created to allocate resources between the military and civilian sectors, ensure an adequate flow of resources to industries supplying crucial civilian goods, and regulate or ban production of other goods.

      The degree to which the War Production Board was able to successfully restructure the economy was astonishing. It ordered a halt to all car manufacturing in Detroit and converted the factories for production of tanks and other military vehicles. Non-military sales of mechanical refrigerators were barred in February 1942, and all production was halted in April, saving a quarter-million tons of critical metals over the next year. WPB blocked production of any new air conditioners used “solely for personal comfort” and ordered that air-conditioning systems in some big-city retail stores be removed and installed in far-flung armament factories. Other regulated goods included lumber, bolts, industrial chemicals, bedsprings, farm equipment, cooking stoves, coal- and oil-fired heating stoves, pressure cookers, and even used washing machines.³⁹

      Authorities sought ways of deeply reducing civilian rail travel to conserve coal. Brewers were restricted in the number of railcars they could use per month for shipping beer, and they were prohibited from hiring trucks to haul additional product. Shipping of retail packages measuring less than sixty inches in length plus girth or weighing under five pounds was prohibited. With ammonia manufacturers feeding the production of explosives for the military, farmers’ supplies of nitrogen fertilizer were cut off, and availability of organic fertilizers was limited.

      While restricting the production and sale of some products, the War Production Board issued standardized and simplified manufacturing specifications for a whole host of others, explaining that “[s]implification, as it is applied in the war program, is a procedure for eliminating unessentials from an item or a line of items. It reduces the number of items in a line and the variety of style, size, color, or ornamentation not actually necessary to the efficiency or usefulness of the product.”⁴⁰ The quantity of metal allowed in light fixtures was cut by 60 to 80 percent. A limited range of sizes was specified for glass jars used for preserving vegetables and fruits, and to save metal, glass-top seals and thinner rings were prescribed. The standardization and simplification program covered a wide range of other products, including women’s dresses, work uniforms, shoes, socks, stockings, blankets, wooden furniture, and farm machinery parts.⁴¹

      The mandatory channeling of a large share of the nation’s resources into the war effort, along with the extensive regulation of civilian production, constricted the supply of some consumer goods. At the same time, price controls kept demand high, raising the specter of shortages, rushes on essential goods, hoarding, and under-the-table selling at high prices to more affluent customers. The nation had gotten its fill of bread lines during the Depression and would tolerate no more of that. But simply lifting price controls would have left lower-income households without adequate access to basic necessities. There remained open only one efficient and just course of action: fair-shares rationing.

      In the simpler of the two types of rationing systems, households were issued a monthly set of stamps, each of which specified the physical quantity of a rationed product (e.g., pounds of sugar) that could be purchased. Some classes of goods—most famously, meats, cheese, and butter—were covered by a different system called “points rationing,” under which each product in a class was assigned a point “price.” For example, for meats, it might mean three points per pound for hamburger and twelve for steak. Ration stamps for these products were denominated in units of points rather than physical quantity.

      During 1942–43, a broad range of goods were brought into the rationing system: fuel oil, kerosene, gasoline, tires, cars, bicycles, stoves, typewriters, shoes, coffee, sugar, meats, canned fish, canned milk, cheese, fats, and processed foods. People seemed to complain most about the systems for rationing gasoline and rubber. Those living in Eastern states were even hit with a ban on “pleasure driving.” Drivers were told they could obtain additional gasoline for commuting to work, but only after they formed a “car club” with at least three other passengers. For food products, price controls and rationing had some salutary effects, not only prompting families across the country to plant 22 million “victory gardens,” but also improving nutrition in all economic classes. Civilian consumption of protein rose 11 percent during the rationing period. Increases for calcium and vitamin A were 12 percent, for vitamin C, 8 percent, and for vitamin B1, 41 percent.⁴²

      Washington moved very cautiously early in the war. War planners imposed price controls and rationing only when they were unavoidable, and made ration limits as generous as possible. The government was perhaps too cautious. In August 1942, when there were only a few products under ration, 70 percent of consumers told pollsters they felt that more extensive rationing was needed in order to eliminate shortages and other problems. Six months later, with controls starting to broaden and tighten, 60 percent of people polled by Gallup still believed that the government should have acted more quickly in rationing scarce goods. Later, when rationing was at its zenith, approval outweighed disapproval by two to one.⁴³ The wartime experience of the 1940s suggests that rationing is well tolerated or even popular when it is a response to a clearly perceived national crisis.

      THE AGE OF LIMITS

      In the 1930s and ’40s, the U.S. and world economies were far smaller than they are today, and greenhouse emissions were far lower. Earthlings, all but a tiny handful, were blissfully unaware that continuing fossil-fuel-enabled growth would one day become a mortal threat to civilization. The original New Deal was free to aim strictly at restoration of financial stability and prosperity. There were plenty of fuels and raw materials sitting there waiting to be put to work, and the biggest environmental problem, the Dust Bowl, could be fixed in the course of restoring the economy of the Plains.

      During the war mobilization that followed, the government spent funds at eight times the rate it had spent fighting the Depression. As far as I know, no one complained at the time about the 65 СКАЧАТЬ